I have read all of your post, very interesting. I don't even think that everyone make the same thing in the other way. I make sauce in this way: 1) soaking mushrooms in water for about the day before using (you can soak mushrooms in milk, then they will keep aroma and flavour and the milk form saoking you can add to the soup or sauce too if you prefer "white soup" of course, besides if you saok in milk mushrooms have the better texture --> to barnmom's post) 2) you should stew mushrooms in salted water in addition soaking water too (it keep flavour) and 2 tablespoons of olive oil 3) add chopped onion, pepper and a little marjoram and simmer 4) when onion and mushrooms will be soft, dust everything with flour (the cream can be added too). Be careful after adding flour - the dish like to stock to the bottom of pan! Bon Apetit!

Ann_t, I've considered it but it isn't worth it for us. The Costcos are not close to us and driving to areas I don't normally visit aren't worth my time/energy/gas. I enjoy cooking but not every day. Our budget is generous for going out and that's what I most enjoy. I LOVE chicken fried steak! But it is possibly the worst thing in the world for you, LOL. Restaurant versions are okay, but The Real Thing is dynamite. I wrote up my mother's method one day, when I was doing a restaurant review of a cafe that did a decent chicken-fried steak we liked. My younger friends and family have never had this recipe, so I included it in my email as a humorous touch. BTW, I do not claim this is an authentic Southern Recipe. This is just how my JapAm mother made it when we were growing up in Chicago, after she learned it from the Mississippi AfrAms in our neighborhood: *The Traditional (e.g., home-cooked) Chicken Fried Steak Yes, this is another thing my Japanese-American mother learned to make from Southerners (Mississippians transplanted to Chicago, hence our familys love of sweet cornbread and really good fried chicken from the legendary Harolds in Chicago [you can look up Harolds Chicken in Wiki]). It can be eaten for dinner or breakfast. Or lunch. Or....well, you get the idea. Like most Southern food, it goes best with biscuits. Real biscuits, the kind made with white lard and even whiter soft wheat flour, rolled and cut with a biscuit cutter (what do you mean, youve never seen a biscuit cutter?!?) and served hot out of the oven with lots of butterc. Definitely not the fake Pillsbury-in-a-can stuff. To the day she died (at age 84), my mothers idea of heaven would have included a hot biscuit dripping with butter. Start with decent-sized pieces of beef, well trimmed of fat. Bottom round is ideal. The mechanically tenderized "cube steak" is sheer laziness and has the wrong texture. Traditionally the pieces of bottom round meat are pounded thin with the edge of a heavy china plate (okay, my mother did use a traditional meat mallet instead). Never, under any circumstances, do you use a wet batter. Never, ever! The egg and the flour do not mix together promiscuously in a bowl; this is a worse heresy than a mechanically tenderized steak. As you are pounding the steak pieces thin, you sprinkle them generously with seasoned flour. The flour, up to a cup or more, is pounded into each steak. "Seasoned", BTW, means salt and pepper. Thats it, no garlic (powder) or onion (same). Just lots of the evil white Mortons. Heres where you get a split between the thin batter-fried and the thick batter-fired recipes. My mother was a thin batter advocate, so she fried the steak after pounding it with the flour. The opposing camp sets out a beaten egg and a pan of more seasoned flour. The steak is dipped in egg and then in flour again, making a thicker batter coating. Either way you do it, next you fry the bacon remember I said there was another whole level to this dish? The bacon doesnt actually appear anywhere else in the recipe, so you probably just nosh on the crispy strips which youve fished out of all that bacon-y, salty, greasy artery-clogging saturated rendered fat. If you happen to have rendered bacon fat on hand, why are you reading this recipe? You already know how to make this. While youre chewing and swallowing bacon, you fry the steaks really crisp in the bacon grease. This is where most restaurants fail. Its bad enough they use some kind of healthy polyunsaturated oil but to make things worse, they dont cook it long enough to really get it dark brown. Drain them on newspaper in a warm oven, while you toss leftover flour into the pan to soak up the bacon grease of course you dont drain any of the fat out, why would you do something so silly when thats where all the flavor is stirring and scraping for a few minutes to cook the flour. Then in goes the evaporated milk whole milk, not that ridiculous reduced fat stuff just enough to make a thick gravy that holds in nice clumps on the spoon. Not glue-y, just very thick. Some people make a thin gravy, but not in our house. Oh, and more pepper, too. Serve with two fried eggs. Or maybe three. Or better yet, eggs and biscuits so you can chase all that yummy gravy around the plate to sop up every bit. Real biscuits, the kind made with white lard and even whiter soft wheat flour, rolled and cut with a biscuit cutter (what do you mean, youve never seen a biscuit cutter?!?) and served hot out of the oven with lots of butter handy. After that, you go clear out an entire field of cotton, or chop down every tree in the forest, for the next eight hours straight (as youve already worked five hours before lunch). The discovery of statins to lower cholesterol is obviously Gods way of saying that every American has a right to copious quantities of salt, fat, and cream, three times a day. Also sugar, but that goes into the coffee, tea, and peach cobbler.

this would have been part of an hors d'oeuvre buffet, not a course at a sit down dinner. I did not know it was only one dish for a buffet. Like everyone else says, by all means serve it!! We prefer it ground too and you can grind it in your food processor. Cube up the meat and just push pulse once or twice, do not over pulse as you will get mush. I make my sausage this way and do it in small batches...just remember to just push pulse once or twice until the meat is ground, empty, refill and repeat. Michelle

I made Bourbon Steak tonight and DH and I both loved it. I used the chip steak so the meat didn't look pretty (but it doesn't on a cheese steak sandwich either LOL). Next time I'll use the whole steak and do my own slicing. I liked that the sauce wasn't too thick. The only change I made was to add a little bit of Worcestershire sauce while it was cooking down. Side dishes were sauteed parslied red skinned potatoes and corn and green lima bean succotash. Thank you for a wonderful recipe, Kathleen.